Tuesday, 28 June 2011

Saturday Kitchen Complaint

I submitted my complaint of OfCom this evening regarding Saturday Kitchen. I wrote it as a member of The British Guild of Beer Writers and I urge other guild members and indeed non-members, to do the same. Thanks to Dave Bailey for leading the fight!

I am complaining about the above program(Saturday Kitchen, BBC1, 10am, 25th June 2011), one that I happen to enjoy from time to time. I have become increasingly frustrated though with the lack of representation of our national indigenous drink, Beer!
Although wine has it's merits it is almost always imported into this country and beer is our national drink and it has had no representation at all on Saturday kitchen. I find this insulting to the programs viewers who should be informed that beer can be paired more easily than wine with any meal.
The BBC, our national broadcasting authority, which is paid for by a tax on television ownership, is deliberately and recklessly damaging the UK economy by its unreasonable and deliberate rejection of beer as a beverage to drink with food. The vast majority of beer consumed in the UK is brewed in the UK using British grown ingredients.
Promoting brands of wine in named supermarkets without also giving air time to quality British beer brands is unacceptable bias for a public funded organisation.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we started celebrating our national beverage instead of ignoring it!
I complain as one member of The British Guild of Beer Writers, not for them.

Yes I did copy and paste some of Dave's words but frankly he wrote them so eloquently I couldn't do any better!

I think for this complaint to be really recognised we need to address the entirety of other tv programes which also are conusmer programes yet portray wine and never ever beer.

BBC may come back and say there has been exposure to beer in some programes but there's been nothing substantially dedicated to beer for a long long time. Even Oz and James' tv show didn't reflect on just beer.

There is a great cause of concern for this. I think we have a strong case for this motion and to get this in writing in a legally construed way is a good idea.

Mentioning whiskey and other ignored beverages such as gin may expose how insular these programes are. BBC = snobbery for the masses.

The key thing isn't the complaint to Ofcom. It's the coverage you get for the complaints to Ofcom. Remember the russell brand/andrew sachs debacle? Well they got a paltry number of complaints before the media jumped on it, at which point thousands of other complaints (from people who were unlikely to have watched the programme) complained.

So basically, everyone should complain, and also get an email out to the nationals, and any food writers you can think of.